Films that never materialized?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by alexpop, Nov 30, 2019.

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  1. samthesham

    samthesham Forum Resident

    Location:
    Moorhead MN
    Sean Penn portraying Phil Ochs was rumoured but never manifested
     
  2. MekkaGodzilla

    MekkaGodzilla Forum Resident

    Location:
    Westerville, Ohio
    [​IMG]

    1937 screenplay written by Salvador Dali for The Marx Brothers.

    Per Wikipedia: It was to be a love story between a Spanish aristocrat named "Jimmy" (to be played by Harpo Marx, with whom Dalí was friends) and a "beautiful surrealist woman, whose face is never seen by the audience". Dalí considered that the central theme of the film would be "the continuous struggle between the imaginative life as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary society" and hoped that the film score could be written by Cole Porter. The film was never produced. Harper's Magazine posits that this was because Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Marx Brothers' studio at the time, considered it to be too surreal: proposed scenes included giraffes wearing gas masks on fire, and Harpo Marx using a butterfly net to capture "the eighteen smallest dwarfs in the city". Serena Davies, writing in the Telegraph, said that Groucho Marx felt that the proposed film was not funny.
     
  3. Apollo C. Vermouth

    Apollo C. Vermouth Forum Resident

    Sequel to Yellow Submarine. Supposedly it was going to be Strawberry Fields Forever or something of that nature. Cousin Brucie was on a WNYW Channel 5 yearly broadcast of Yellow Submarine, I think it was a Saturday afternoon movie, and was interviewing Al Brodax who was a teacher at NYIT Old Westbury here on Long Island and asked him about it as one of the interview sequences that was aired before seguing back into the movie. I remember there being an article in The Daily News too. I think Michael Jackson was getting involved with it on the music end...so it had to be either just after he purchased the Beatles catalog or a few years after. For some reason I'm thinking '86/'87/'88. Don't know how they could have topped Yellow Submarine...but it would have been interesting. Surprised they haven't done anything since in regards to an animated movie sequel to Yellow Submarine.

    Side Note...Am I the only one that finds Cousin Brucie really annoying??!!?? Hearing that voice for 4 or 5 hours a day back in the heyday of music would have drove me nuts.
     
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  4. MekkaGodzilla

    MekkaGodzilla Forum Resident

    Location:
    Westerville, Ohio
    He's family. Whatcha gonna do? :shrug:
     
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  5. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits.... Thread Starter

    Dalí favoured Cole Porter, great taste.
     
  6. Jason Manley

    Jason Manley Senior Member

    Location:
    O-H-I-O
    About ten years ago there was some serious momentum happening around a Kurt Cobain biopic. It was originally to be penned by David Benioff (Game of Thrones) and at some point was turned over to Oren Moverman (I'm Not Here, Love & Mercy) to both write and direct.

    Moverman's screenplay, titled This Is Gonna Suck is more of an intimate look about the moments off camera and in-between the iconic takes; only focusing on the years 1987-1993. It was last spoken about by Moverman in some of the press for Love & Mercy and I've not seen or heard anything about it since.

    On the one hand, it's really a shame that such great talent like David Benioff and Oren Moverman have both had their hand in noodling out the life of, perhaps, the most famous member of a single generation. But, on the other, the biopic is a very stale format that, if not done damn near perfectly with some high-wire ambition can be very canned and unmemorable.

    Montage Of Heck seems to have been meant as the fulfilling final statement on Cobain so perhaps it's unlikely we'll get a biopic. But, given how easily they can turn out so badly, maybe that's not a bad thing.
     
  7. Steve Litos

    Steve Litos Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago IL
    I remember that comic book. My cousin was a huge fan of Sgt. Rock and he always had the issues around the house...o
    I listened to this a few years ago. Cagney is great!
     
  8. The Hermit

    The Hermit Wavin' that magick glowstick since 1976

    Arnie had quite a few tantalizing non-starters;

    Crusade with Paul Verhoeven... a blood-soaked medieval epic stopped mere weeks before shooting because of an escalating budget and director Paul Verhoeven going a bit crazy! The studio decided to make Cutthroat Island instead... and subsequently went out of business as a result, 'nuff said.

    With Wings As Eagles with Milos Foreman... WWII drama with Arnie playing an SS officer who refuses to kill Jewish prisoners... no idea why this never got made.

    King Conan: Crown of Iron with John Milius... the true sequel to Conan the Barbarian, which never happened because once they finally got financing for it, Arnie was subsequently elected Governor of California!

    And then there's the honorary mentions;

    Guillermo del Toro's two-film adaptation of The Hobbit... everything was done bar cameras actually rolling... but MGM's financial woes stopped it in it's tracks until del Toro left the project altogether (or so the official story goes).

    Kubrick's Napoleon biopic... could have been Stan the Man's masterpiece; he was obsessed with it for decades and always wanted to make it... until the moneymen decided otherwise, alas...

    George Miller's Justice League... allegedly mere days away from filming in 2007 when the Australian Film Commission denied them tax rebates (by a single vote!)...
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2019
  9. Steve Litos

    Steve Litos Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago IL
    Speaking of James Cagney, he and his brother Bill founded "Cagney Productions" in 1943. They intended to produce films themselves.

    The most notable un-produced film from the Cagney brothers was Thorn Smith's (author of Topper) "The Stray Lamb" in which the protagonist Mr. Lamb is transformed into various animals including a kangaroo. Mentioned stars were James Cagney and Audie Murphy who was under contract to Cagney for a brief period.

    The film must have been in pre-production because there are old newspaper clippings from 1947 about the accidental death of the trained Kangaroo! It was frightened by the tractor on the Cagney farm, tried to jump a fence and it's neck was broken!


    Another mentioned Cagney Production was a lighthearted tale about the American "Irish Travellers".
     
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  10. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    Man's Fate (1970). David Niven, Max Von Sydow, and Liv Ullman were in rehearsals for director Fred Zinneman's adaptation of the Malraux novel when MGM boss Jim Aubrey pulled the plug.
     
  11. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    Flashman (1970). Richard Lester was set to direct the film of George MacDonald Fraser's delightful adventure pastiche, with the underappreciated (at least in the US) John Alderton in the title role of the Victorian era soldier-cad. Apparently the cast and crew had assembled in Spain when the financing was pulled.

    Five years later Lester would film the second novel in the series, Royal Flash, with a miscast Malcolm McDowell as Flashman.

    Damn your eyes! George MacDonald Fraser's 'Flashman'

    From Magical Mystery Tours, by Brian Epstein assistant and Apple exec Tony Bramwell:

    I was very eager to make the Flashman books into films. I thought if they were done properly they could be bigger than the Bond films. But so much nonsense was talked about who was going to play Flashman. Someone wanted John Alderton to play the lead, which was totally wrong. He was a kind of gentle bumbling comic, with no edge. Someone else suggested Dave Clark, which even Dave found hilarious. There were long discussions about the feel of the books, whether they should be changed in any way. I suppose they were a bit jingoistic, but that was part of what made them so different. Dinners were held with people like Dick Lester, who had made the Beatles films, John Davis, head of Rank, and Malcolm McDowell, who they had finally settled on as Flashman. I thought he was terribly miscast. I said if the right Flashman could be found, another Sean Connery, we would have a major hit. In the end someone else made Flashman, but it didn’t achieve much.​

    I must say I disagree with Bramwell's opinion of John Alderton. If you've seem Zardoz or his Upstairs, Downstairs appearances you know JA definitely has an "edge".
     
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  12. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    [​IMG]

    James Brooke - Wikipedia

    Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, KCB (29 April 1803[1] – 11 June 1868), was a British soldier and adventurer who founded the Kingdom of Sarawak in Borneo. He ruled as the first White Rajah of Sarawak from 1841 until his death in 1868.

    Brooke was born and raised under the Company Raj in India. After a few years of education in England, he served in the Bengal Army, was wounded, and resigned his commission. He then bought a ship and sailed out to the Malay Archipelago where, by helping to crush a rebellion, he became governor of Sarawak. He then vigorously suppressed piracy in the region and, in the ensuing turmoil, restored the Sultan of Brunei to his throne, for which the Sultan made Brooke the Rajah of Sarawak. He ruled until his death

    ---

    Brooke was also a model for the hero of Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim, and he is briefly mentioned in Kipling's short story "The Man Who Would Be King".

    In 1936, Errol Flynn intended to star in a film of Brooke's life called The White Rajah for Warner Bros., based on a script by Flynn himself. However although the project was announced for filming it was never made.
     
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  13. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits.... Thread Starter

    Richard Morant would have been perfect playing Flashman ( again).
     
  14. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    He was great in Breaker Breaker
     
  15. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits.... Thread Starter

    Played Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays(1971).
     
  16. Maggie

    Maggie like a walking, talking art show

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    • Terry Gilliam's Watchmen, with a completed script by Sam Hamm, circa 1990.
    • David Hayter's Watchmen (2003) -- a screen test was filmed: . Project later taken over by Darren Aronofsky
    • Paul Greengrass's Watchmen (2006), based on a new script

    • RoboCop 2 (original 1988 treatment, now being filmed as RoboCop Returns)
    • Darren Aronofsky's RoboCop remake based on his own script (2010)

    • A million Ridley Scott films: I Am Legend with Schwarzenegger, Tripoli, Gladiator 2, Blood Meridian, The Forever War, Monopoly, several Blade Runner sequels...
    • A million Spielberg projects: Thomas Crapper movie, Close Encounters sequel, Night Skies, ET 2, Roger Rabbit sequel, Benjamin Button, Indiana Jones on Mars, Martian Chronicles, autobiographical movie from 1999, Catcher in the Rye, Interstellar, Oldboy manga adaptation, Harvey remake, MLK biopic, RoboPocalypse, etc., etc., etc., etc.....
     
  17. Saintbert

    Saintbert Forum Resident

    Location:
    Helsinki
    Rainer Werner Fassbinder died, in 1982, next to an unfinished script based on the life of the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. (Margarethe von Trotta later made a film on the same subject.) He had gotten further on a film based on the novel Cocaine (1921) by Pitigrilli, writing a script, negotiating budgets etc., and for me, that is the more interesting project. He only put it off in order to work on Veronika Voss, which has a similar theme as regards narcotics.

    To give an idea of the prospective cinematic style of Cocain, Fassbinder mentioned Fellini's Amarcord, Pasolini's Salò, Oshima's In the Realm of Senses, and the epilogue of his own Berlin Alexanderplatz. Knowing of Fassbinder's interest gave me an impetus to read the Pitigrilli novel, and it is brilliant, funny and chaotic. Controversial in its time, I'm afraid it is somewhat obscure nowadays and not easily available in English, for example.
     
  18. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    Hitchcock came to the U.S. to film the Titanic story for Selznick. When that didn't pan out he moved over to Rebecca.
     
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  19. Two early feature-length films by David Lynch that never made it past the drawing board were Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble, with Steve Martin as a possible lead actor in the latter. Read about these and other aborted Lynch projects at this Wiki page.
     
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  20. evillouie

    evillouie Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toledo
    One Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that hasn't been mentioned is Oliver Stone's proposed Planet Of The Apes remake, which was talked about for years before Tim Burton's version was made.
     
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  21. Hall Cat

    Hall Cat Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    David Crosby's hippie movie for United Artists, Family
     
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  22. Platterpus

    Platterpus Senior Member

    Terry Gilliam was going to do a sequel to Time Bandits in the mid 90s but this never happened.
     
  23. Foundation-Isaac Asimov's novel first novel in his series. Received a terrific adaption by the late Harlan Ellison.
    The Defective Detective from Terry Gilliam
    Megalopolis-Francis Ford Coppola's Science fiction epic film.
    Neuromancer-Based on the novel by William Gibson. It's time may have passed with Cyperpunk kind passé.
     
  24. misterdecibel

    misterdecibel Bulbous Also Tapered

    Sometime around the end of the 1990s, the venue where I worked hosted a wrap party for a film that Billy Bob Thornton had made. I think it had been done in the same area where he shot "Slingblade". Among the attendees at the party were Laura Dern, Andy Griffith, John Prine, and Dusty Hill, all of whom apparently had parts in the movie. As far as I know the film still has yet to be released.
     
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  25. Vinny123

    Vinny123 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida
    . A little bit of Cousin Brucie went a long way.
     
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